Play It Again, Lam

Not when I returned a few months ago. On my first visit, back in 1969.

I'm going to be honest with you. Where war is concerned, few people are. I'm going to tell you a story about Vietnam that is probably unlike any you've read before.

Nobody dies in my story. I served in the Republic of South Vietnam a quarter century ago as the ecutive officer of a U.S. Army boat company, and I don't know anybody who was killed in the war. Whenever I think that life hasn't given me a break, I remember that.

When I returned earlier this year, it was for reasons unlike those of most vets. Ollie North went back and wrote a book he called One More Mission. Mine would be titled One More Meal.

I was a captain, a deskbound Transportation Corps officer assigned to the U.S. Army Harbor Craft Company (Provisional) in Saigon. At the time, it was the largest boat company in the army. Yes, the army has boats, lots of them: tugs, oating cranes, tankers, landing craft, barges, and more. You hear a lot these days about "good"wars and "bad"wars, but I've always suspected that mine was a third kind, an unexceptional war. When I went to the Washington National Records Center, in Maryland, to get information about my unit, nobody could nd any evidence in the 300,000 square feet of paper stored there that it had even existed. A clerk said to me, "The record-keeping over there was pathetic, at best. When somebody does a history of Vietnam based on what we have here, anything that is close to accurate will be purely accidental."

I was there, all right, and so was the harbor-craft company, even if the government refuses to admit it. Almost every morning, one of our tugboats would head up the Dong Nai River to Long Binh Post, making about two knots against the current, towing a barge wallowing under a massive load of fuel or ammunition. It was the ammunition, the hundreds of tons of assorted explosives, that troubled us. The riverbanks were dense with foliage, plenty of cover for one overly ambitious Vietcong armed with an RPG rocket launcher to fire a round that would blow up the barge, the tug, and probably himself.

Most mornings, the tug left without me. That's because I was a REMF, the unofficial designation given to soldiers who never went into the field by those men who fought in it. I didn't ask to be a REMF, nor did I volunteer for more-demanding duty. I took what the army gave me. REMF stood for "Rear Echelon Motherfucker,"and there were a lot of us.

I didn't endure many hardships, except when the mess hall ran out of ice cream, my customary late-afternoon snack. I've heard that only about 15 percent of U.S. forces sent to Vietnam were actually in combat, which meant that 85 percent of all the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen (only members of the Salvation Army see less combat than airmen) were pretty much like me. Not long ago, I called my former boss, who was the best officer I ever knew and is now retired in Phoenix. I asked him what he thought of me as a soldier. "I was always impressed by your cheerfulness,"said Victor Largesse, then a major and the company commander. I gured that for a euphemism, and I was right. "I always thought you were on a lark, never took it seriously."

When people talk about the turning point of the Vietnam War, they always bring up the Tet Offensive of 1968, when the Vietcong achieved tremendous psychological victories, even capturing the U.S. embassy in Saigon for a few hours. (Today, a plaque on the wall of the old embassy building honors that triumph.) I always thought the turning point came in late 1969. When I arrived early in the year, Vietnam still felt like a combat zone. By the time I left, my unit was marching in parades. The REMFs had taken control.

Once or twice a month, I got out of my swivel chair and went to war. I didn't have to, but I did. It was guilt, not patriotism or heroism, that inspired me. I was always sort of ashamed that the only time I regularly went on the water was for dinner on our hundred-ton oating crane, the one with the just-naturalized cook who made free use of his Italian mother's recipes. To this day I don't recall many better meals than his lobster fra diavolo made with pilfered lobster tails.

I would grab my helmet and flak jacket and jump on one of the tugs heading up the Dong Nai. Once I was aboard, my job was not to get in the way. No shot was ever fired at a boat while I was on it, and while I'd like to think it was my steadfast presence behind a machine gun that made the difference, I suspect it was luck. The trip took hours, and standing for that long a time with that much clothing on in the intense heat of a country that is always either hot and wet or hot and dry builds a thirst.

By the time we docked, I'd be hungry and dehydrated, and I'd head for the Chinese restaurant on post for sweet-and-sour pork and about a half-dozen Cokes. I don't eat much sweet-and-sour pork anymore, but when I do, I recall those rides upriver and I immediately order a Coke. You've heard about flashbacks. That's mine.

···

"Where are you staying?"asked Tony Newman, chief of the Saigon office of the International Organization for Migration. Officially, Saigon is now Ho Chi Minh City, but only people who don't live there call it that.

"The Majestic,"I said.

"Which room?"

"Five-oh-one."

"I think Westmoreland stayed there,"he said.

In defense of William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam throughout most of the Sixties, I would like to say this: He was an uninspiring general of dubious leadership abilities, but I am sure he would not have stayed in room 501 of the Hotel Majestic.

Don't get me wrong. I like the Majestic. When I made plans to return to Saigon, I requested accommodations there. The Majestic once offered the grandest lodgings in a city once called "the Paris of the Orient,"and the Saigon of decades past is what I hoped to find.

It wasn't difficult. Saigon doesn't look much like Paris anymore, but for that matter, it didn't look much like Paris back in 1969. The city does look remarkably like it did a quarter century ago, which is not something that can be said of Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo and most of the other great metropolitan centers of Asia. Credit for this time warp goes to the less-than-innovative development strategies implemented by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam under the leadership of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Saigon is a city that has stood still.

Camp Davies, where I was stationed, was an obscure chunk of dock space on the fringe of the city in 1969. The docks, warehouses and Quonset huts are still there, looking more insignificant than ever, although nobody remembers an American military installation named Camp Davies. The famous Bun Bo Hue soup, a thin but fatty scallion-and-strange-meat-laced broth that was sold at stands everywhere for a few cents, continues to be sold at stands everywhere for a few cents. As it did then, it fills me with awe and respect for a people who relish hot soup in 95-degree heat. Since I was last there, pizza has evolved. Now you can also get Chicago-style thick crust, and these days home (or hotel) delivery is available. I ordered a large American pie from Annies Pizza—"Ann"is an Americanization of "Anh"—and it came in a cardboard box bearing the catchy slogan "When the taste of home beats ya, call for Annies Pizza."Most astonishingly, the monetary system is almost exactly as it was during the war: Back then, the standard currencies were American dollars (or military scrip) and Vietnamese piastres; today, they are American dollars and Vietnamese dong.

I didn't go back to see Vietnam. I didn't see much. I didn't see much of it during the war. I went back to see Saigon. Almost every night during my tour of duty, while most officers hung out at Camp Davies's sorry excuse for an officers' club and watched a movie projected on a bedsheet, I got in my jeep and went to town. I loved everything about Saigon, especially the women, exquisitely dressed in the traditional flowing, high-necked ao dai, but also the food: rice cakes, fried noodles, scallions, garlic, mint, cilantro, carrots, shrimp and mysterious greens. I learned to say "No nuoc mam [fermented fish sauce], please."I loved everything but the heat, which was so intense that I had difficulty writing home; the perspiration would pour down my arm and smear the ink.

This time, I made sure I'd have air-conditioning. The Majestic did, and that's all I needed to know. I wasn't concerned that it once had a reputation as "the CIA hotel."I was worried about its current reputation of having seen better days. The Majestic is war-weary. It served as a Japanese barrack during WWII. It occasionally came under rocket fire during the Vietnam War, precisely because its prestigious location on the Saigon River made it an inviting target from the far shore. Today, it is undergoing renovation, painstakingly slow renovation.

My room, 501, had not yet gotten the call. It had a warning posted inside the door, the same one found in all government-run hotels: No cooking, ironing, weapons, toxics, explosives, inflammables, pets or prostitutes allowed. (I cheated, sneaked in a travel iron.) The TV received three stations, all providing in-depth coverage of foreign dignitaries arriving to discuss industrial development. The departure of these very same diplomats also made the news. The night attendant on my floor was Le Thanh Son, 46, a former UH-1B (Huey) helicopter pilot for the Republic of South Vietnamese forces, now desperately seeking permission to enter the United States. "Please tell the American government to think about the Vietnamese veteran,"he said. "On TV and in newspapers I see that they help the Vietcong veteran, but they forget about the Republic of South Vietnam veteran. We are veterans too."

For $65 a night, single occupancy, I got a platform bed as hard as a tank turret, a couch covered in an oilcloth-like-bright-yellow fabric, a telephone made of red-and-white Lucite and red wall-to-wall carpeting accented with a lime-green throw rug. I wouldn't have changed a thing. From my picture window overlooking the Saigon River, I could see the Saigon Floating Hotel, which had been towed up from Australia a few years ago, and the infamous My Canh floating restaurant, bombed by the Vietcong in 1968. That attack pointed out the difference between the futile strategy of Westmoreland and the successful strategy of the Vietcong. He went after their hearts and minds. They went after our stomachs.

From Tony Newman's description, I deduced that Westmoreland's room must have been 504, a top-of-the-line, $120-per-night suite down the hall. Nicely but somewhat gaudily decorated in chinoiserie, it has lacquered furniture, a Yamaha piano and a very Sixties sunken tub. I could just picture Westy, immersed in the bubbles, walkie-talkie to his ear, learning of the fall of Hue while an aide stood at attention, holding a fluffy towel. For some, Vietnam was that kind of war.

···

Newman drove over to the Majestic to pick me up. With me was Ron Wormser, a dentist and old friend. Ron thought I'd invited him along for companionship, but he was wrong. You'd travel to Saigon with a dentist, too, if you'd once had your wisdom teeth chiseled out in a field hospital. I asked Newman to choose a restaurant I'd never find on my own, and he headed toward Cholon, the Chinese section of town, then turned onto side streets. We ended up at Quan Bo Song, or "Riverside Tavern,"located on Bis Ham Tu Street.

Seemingly tiny from the outside, the restaurant stretches far back, ending at the water. Its dimensions reminded me of a church in Venice. Newman recommended the fried river crabs with sweet tamarind sauce; after a few bites I had an accurate premonition that crabs of any sort would become my favorite food in Saigon. We sat at the top of a pierlike extension jutting into a tributary of the Saigon River, listening to the creaking of tired, unpainted fishing boats docked alongside while Newman told us of some fundamental changes that have come upon Saigon since his arrival. He said that four years ago, "this was a pretty paranoid, dark place. People were not ready to talk to you on the street, we were not allowed to visit a Vietnamese person's home, and they weren't allowed to visit us. All meetings took place in lobbies. I don't know how it happened, but suddenly it was no longer necessary."

His organization, acting something like a consulate, helps arrange orderly departures for legal emigrants. Of the 350,000 émigrés helped in the past four years, about 30,000 were Amerasians and tens of thousands of others were men and women who had spent years in the notorious reeducation camps. (I later met Hoang Mgoc Nguyen, managing editor of a semiofficial newspaper, the Saigon Newsreader, and asked him if he'd been treated terribly during his two years of internment. He replied, "No. They kept hundreds of thousands of people in these camps. How can they all be mistreated? I'd say the treatment was acceptable. They simply kept us there.")

The waiter brought us a two-pound river fish that he could not identify, even in Vietnamese. While it simmered in a light coconut-scented broth heated by a Sterno-type contraption, Newman pointed out and tried to make sense of some of the incongruities of Vietnam.

I asked him why the people of Saigon are so friendly toward Americans, who abandoned them in 1975, and he said, "They blame the Russians for all their problems. The Russians had no money."He said the government of Vietnam tries to emulate Singapore, a one-party state that provides everything for all citizens, notwithstanding the fact that Singapore is one of the most ardently anticommunist states in the world. He said that while the opening up of Vietnam will indeed allow more departures, he hears that some Vietnamese living in Southern California see it as an opportunity to come home: "People who left want to come back and die here. They're miserable in the United States. They can't contribute anything to the family, they can't understand their grandchildren, they miss the life here."And he quietly noted something seldom talked about, the 300,000 Vietnamese MIAs.

With our chopsticks we excavated chunks of the fish, added mint and cucumber, wrapped the combination in lettuce, dipped it in vinegar sauce and ate. Lunch for three, beer included, cost $13.

Quan Bo Song served the best seafood I had in Saigon. Finding the best Chinese food turned out to be an ordeal. My first excursion into Cholon resulted in an aesthetic experience I would not care to repeat. At the restaurant Thanh Tra, modern sliding glass doors open on to a dining room of spacious tables, black-and-white-striped chairs and TV monitors broadcasting gory music videos from every corner. While eating tiny crabs in a wonderful sweet-and-sour sauce that tasted like preserved orange peel in honey, Ron and I watched a groom get blown apart by a shotgun blast as he danced with his bride. While eating roasted duck and fried Chinese bread—it tasted like duck 'n' doughnuts—we watched a badly battered and bleeding kung fu fighter reach into his pants, yank out a .45 and blow away his overconfident foe. Perhaps a populace inured to war would consider this acceptable mealtime entertainment, but I found it distracting.

My luck changed during a dinner at the well-regarded Phuong Hong. While I liked the entertainment—young female singers in miniskirts, Bill Murray look-alikes crooning ballads—the menu was too extreme for my tastes. Merely to read of the availability of sea ginseng on deer veins and the highly euphonious fried frogs in foil dulled my appetite. (Should this be precisely what you're looking for, I suggest the restaurant Vinh Loi, where a signboard outside promises "GREAT TASTE…GREAT VARIETY…GREAT SERVICE. SPECIAL DISHES: COBRA. TURTLE. BAT. EVERYONE WELCOME!")

While I was dispiritedly picking away at fried rice with an egg on top, a safe choice, two young girls at a birthday celebration one table away started giggling uncontrollably. I believe they were amused by my ineptness with chopsticks.

Well, this burned me up, so I did what any former American fighting man would do under the circumstances: I stuck a chopstick up each nostril. This incited such hilarity that I'm sure my presence will be missed at next year's birthday fete. Ron and I were each given a slice of cake, included in all birthday photos and invited to dinner the following night.

That's how we came to be at the restaurant Ha Ky, located on a block of Duong Ta Uyen Street lined with stands selling whole roasted chickens and whole roasted (and beflowered) pigs. The restaurant is tiny and unair-conditioned, with four big, round tables in the front room and four wall calendars (one bride, one fish, one hunk, one unadorned) as decorations. Appropriately, the chicken was superb, easily the best I tasted in Saigon, and so were the large fried crabs, the kind that demand endless cracking to expose a few bites of incredibly sweet meat. We concluded with a plate of mid chicken innards (livers and spleens) and un-hatched eggs that I enjoyed a little less.

A few days later, the same group of birthday celebrants reassembled at the Yellow Umbrella Cook Shop, a slightly more upscale storefront place located on the Mac Thi Buoi Street in the heart of what passes for Saigon's nightlife district. On the same street can be found the Hard Rock Cafe, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to any establishment of the same name in capitalist society, and Apocalypse Now, the best-known of the expat bars. Apocalypse Now is a casual spot catering to European backpackers and middle-aged Americans in T-shirts who want to forget how old they really are. The recorded Sixties and Seventies rock is played so loud it could drown out an air strike.

At the Yellow Umbrella, I had my favorite Vietnamese dish of the trip, a tureen of delicate, fragrant sweet-and-sour soup prepared with fresh pineapple and fresh cilantro. Submerged in it was a massive chunk of yet another unnamed river fish; I was able to ascertain that such soup is often made with mullet, salmon or eel, but this was none of those. This was just ca, or fish. Here also I tried lobster that would have been perfect had convention not dictated that I eat the shell, and a bony chicken dish. Except at Ha Ky, every chicken I ate in Saigon was bony, the kind Colonel Sanders would grade 4-F.

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Nobody shot at me during the war. I never thought anybody would. Nevertheless, I was as prepared for battle as any man could be who had never fired an M16, the army's new combat rifle. I selected my own weapons: a .45-caliber pistol that I could shoot pretty well and an M79 grenade launcher that I had only the remotest idea how to fire. Then again, with a grenade, I only had to come close.

One problem with being in my unit was that ammunition wasn't easily obtained. For administrative purposes, we worked under a logistical command whose mission was to unload ships. This had advantages, since the soldiers who did the unloading were the very ones who stole the steaks and lobster tails I kept in the freezer of the full-sized refrigerator in my quarters, but these guys had little use for ammunition. The only people likely to fire on them were the captains of the American freighters they were plundering. The way we got most of our ammunition was either to trade for it or to steal it.

Since we were the guys who towed ammunition upriver, all that we required was within reach. What I needed were the 40-mm. grenades I enjoyed firing at trees along the Dong Nai. (Officially, this was called "recon-by-fire.") It didn't make sense to break into a pallet and steal a single box of grenades, because the theft would be noted and investigated. It was better to break into a pallet, take a single box of grenades and throw the rest of the pallet into the river. That way nobody would notice a thing. Now you know yet another reason the Vietnam War cost so much.

I was reminded of these ammunition-procurement procedures when I browsed the gift shop of the Majestic Hotel and found souvenir cigarette lighters made from 40-mm. grenades. Everywhere in Saigon, souvenirs of the war are for sale. It seemed as though every bit of military equipment abandoned by the American forces has been salvaged, cleaned and put on the market. Certainly the legendary profligacy of the American soldier would tend to support this conclusion, as would the equally renowned resourcefulness of the Vietnamese people. In reality, almost all of it is fake.

On my first morning in Saigon, I was walking down Dong Khoi Street, formerly Tu Do Street, in its day the Rodeo Drive of Southeast Asia. I gulped with nostalgia as I passed display cases filled with snap-top Zippo lighters engraved with the disheartening aphorisms of those who fought in Vietnam: "Live by chance…Love by choice…Kill by profession,"or "If I had a farm in Vietnam and a home in hell, I'd sell my farm and go home."Later I realized they were counterfeits. The so-called American Market at the corner of Yersin and Nguyen Cong Tru streets is filled with all manner of war surplus material, even helmet liners with yellowing instruction booklets inside. They're fakes. In all the dozens of booths and shops of the market I saw one item, a canteen, that I believe was real.

Knockoff watches are a mainstay of the tourist industry. Come to think of it, they may be the mainstay of the entire economic resurrection of Vietnam we hear so much about. I bought a lovely Breitling for $35 at a shop on Dong Khoi. It immediately stopped working, and I traded it for a Rolex that expired as soon as I got home. For friendly service and good prices on fake watches, I liked the War Time Souvenir Shop of the War Crimes Exhibition, which was known as the Museum of American War Crimes until diplomatic ties between Vietnam and the United States improved.

Strolling through a display of American atrocities might seem like punishment enough, but Ron and I weren't satisfied. Our next stop was a rude French bistro, Le Restaurant. As we walked in, the maître d' silently led us to a table, wordlessly handed us menus, mutely walked away and ignored us for the next fifteen minutes. When we got up and walked out, out departure elicited no comment. Perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe Saigon still is the Paris of the Orient.

We moved on to a restaurant called Vietnam House, which offers a cool, inviting, colonial-style ground-floor piano bar. Play it again, Lam. Unfortunately, food is served only upstairs, in a not-quite-so-cool room featuring a Southeast Asian version of The Lawrence Welk Show. Whenever the musicians broke into an American standard, clumps of tourists broke into frenzied applause. We left after sampling a few unexceptional dishes, but we enjoyed eavesdropping on a young American businessman at the next table who was suggesting all kinds of exotic trips to his extremely young and beautiful Vietnamese companion.

Outside, we ran into the mama-san who had hired out the extremely young and beautiful Vietnamese companion. She was pacing up and down, looking terribly worried. She asked if we had seen the girl. We said that we had. She asked if the girl was being well-treated. We assured her that as long as the child hadn't ordered the astonishingly overcooked fried rice served in a clay pot with nearly invisible bits of chicken, she was likely to survive.

···

Vietnamese women liked me, and Vietnam is a great place to be liked by women. This popularity with women wasn't noticeable before I arrived in Vietnam in 1969 and it has never recurred. I've tried to understand it. I think it was the fatigues.

I had great fatigues. I got them in the mid-Sixties, when the United States invaded the Dominican Republic. Nobody remembers us invading the Dominican Republic, but we did. I was a second lieutenant then and quite nervous about joining the Inter-American Peace Force and going off to war, but everything worked out. My job was to load people onto airplanes.

Back in those days, U.S. Army jungle fatigues looked like something you would buy at Banana Republic, except there was no Banana Republic. They had pockets and flaps all over. By the time I got to Vietnam, jungle fatigues had changed. They had been streamlined and didn't look good, but I had kept my old fatigues and always wore them when I went out at night. Dressed in my multi-flapped fatigues adorned with captain's bars and the appropriate "USFORDOMREP"(Unites States Forces, Dominican Republic) right-shoulder combat patch, I looked great. Or at least I looked great until I started gaining weight from all that steak and lobster I kept in my freezer.

About the most spectacular women I came upon worked in the South Vietnamese Air Force Officers' Club, located at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. The airport is still functioning, although now it has so many miles of excess runways and empty parking areas it looks forlorn. I couldn't find the old officers' club. It so emplified imperialist decadence, I suspect some government official ordered it destroyed.

As I recall, the ground floor and upstairs functions rooms were used for weddings, banquets and other activities commonly associated with the social life of a military officer. Downstairs was the lewdest bar I've ever patronized. The front door opened on to a narrow, dark foyer lined with long benches packed with extremely tiny young women with extremely large breasts—where they got them, I have no idea. As you walked the girlie gauntlet, they would reach out, clutch your arm in a death grip and attempt to drag you through the bar into a nearly pitch-black back room.

I recall one memorable occasion when I declined to enter the back room and three girls desperate for business surrounded me and started pushing and pulling. Not willing to go but not wanting to hurt anyone, I stood perfectly still, rigid as a statue. Although I was wearing combat boots, they slid me along the floor like a piece of furniture.

Once in the back room, anything from fondling on up was available, provided drinks were purchased for the young lady. These drinks sold for $2 and were called Saigon tea, which is what they were. In every bar in Saigon, the price was the same and the drink was the same. If you were in a discreet establishment where the women really were hostesses, you would be expected to buy a Saigon tea every fifteen to twenty minutes. In the back room of the South Vietnamese Air Force Officers' Club, they arrived every minute or two. I never sought the company of a hostess, rarely bought a Saigon tea and never entered the back room of the officers' club, at least not after my first, harrowing visit. In my favorite bar, now gone, the women took note of my reluctance to purchase beverages. They nick-named me "Captain Cheap."

For anyone journeying to Saigon today, I can recommend an unthreatening starter bar on Hai Ba Trung, Linda's Pub, provided the police haven't already put it out of business. (This happens frequently in the local bar trade.) I've never encountered such subtle solicitation. The woman who came up to Ron and me asked politely if she could sit with us, then said nothing at all until we offered to buy her a drink.

She said shyly, "I work here. Customer come here. He like me, he talk to me. Ask what me like drinking. I say okay."

"So,"I said, "that means you'd like a drink."

She said no, she didn't really want a drink.

I said fine, she didn't have to have a drink.

She said sadly, "But if you do not buy drink, boss he get angry with me."

"So,"I said, clenching my teeth, "I'll buy you a drink."

She said I didn't have to if I didn't want to.

About this point, I started getting nostalgic for the old officers' club. Say what you will about the corruption and incompetence of the former South Vietnamese regime, at least Diem didn't make a mess of the bars.

I told her I absolutely insisted on buying her a drink.

She said in that case she'd have juice.

She told me her name was Anh and gave her age as 16. I did a quick calculation and took the same percentage off my age. I told her I was 34. She told Ron and me to be careful out there "because many, many ladies outside very dangerous. You like women outside, you sleep with her, you take care, she take your money. Some are ladyboys. Not true lady."

I never had anything to do with ladyboys. I can't speak for Ron.

It's impossible to make the acquaintance of loose ladies (and, I suppose, loose ladyboys) if you travel around Saigon at night, particularly if you do it by cyclo. A cyclo is a half-bicycle, half-rickshaw contraption that might be the most dangerous form of urban transportation ever invented. Every trip reminded me of the cliché that life in the Orient is cheap. Almost every night as Ron and I were heading back to the Majestic by cyclo, we would be ambushed by other cyclos darting out of the side streets, each one carrying a prostitute. I found that the best way to deal with them was to explain that we were too poor and they were too beautiful.

Women of indisputable availability are also to be found at mini-bars, which are not to be confused with hotel-room refrigeration units. Cyclo drivers, who earn only a few dollars a day at most, will do and say anything to lure you to a mini-bar, since they get a commission. Their mantra goes "Want drink cold beer…want young girl…want very young girl?"It's hard to know if they want to take you to a brothel or an orphanage.

A few times, Ron and I acquiesced. One night, our drivers pedaled up Hai Ba Trung Street and stopped at a small garage. We climbed down, and two girls came out. They escorted us into a service bay containing two seats that looked as though they had been ripped out of a school bus. An eager attendant brought out two cans of hot beer. The two girls sat down next to us. We started laughing. They seemed offended. We gave each of them $5, returned the unopened beers and ran for our cyclos. If you wish to visit the worst little whorehouse in Saigon, it's at 144 Hai Ba Trung. Look for the Castrol sign out front.

Another night, our drivers made a quick left off Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street onto a small, quiet, seemingly residential street. The houses were dark. To our horror, the drivers began hammering on the door of a rather nice home. After a few minutes, it opened. There stood Ward Cleaver, or at least his Asian equivalent, rubbing sleep from his eyes. We were mortified.

Ward motioned for us to enter. We did. We walked through his GE kitchen to a windowless mini-bar secreted in the center of the house. In a minute, the whole tousled family appeared. Hi, June. Hi, Wally. Say, Beaver, I didn't know you had a sister who turned tricks. Once again, we handed over money and ran.

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Economically, Saigon makes no sense. The average income is about $200 a month, but almost everybody seems to ride a $2,000 Honda. The standard of living is low, but shops teem with goods—at one stall, I counted twenty-one kinds of rice. If you compare the number of closed and shuttered storefronts in Saigon with those in Manhattan, you would assume it was America that was rising from the ashes of economic devastation.

With so many major Southeast Asian cities saturated, or at least running out of space for office towers, Saigon is a natural outlet for the economic energy of Asia. The price of property is already eight to ten times what is was two years ago. I heard stories of Vietnamese who possess long-term leases on property costing them $40 a month who charge $3,000 a month in rent. The economic redevelopment of Vietnam is just about the only topic in the local news, and only a very few suggest that it isn't going to be as easy as generally believed.

Nguyen, the managing editor of the Saigon Newsreader, believes an absence of skilled educators will curtail Vietnam's progress. "You cannot blame the Russian education in physics and chemistry, but it fails with economics and management,"he told me. "The more we have learned from them about this, the more we fail. My staff is trained in the Socialist system. It has no idea how free market operates. That is why I am cautious when I hear foreigners say 'Your country will be a dragon in five years.' It is all rubbish to me."

Nguyen Ngoc Bich, a Harvard-trained lawyer and businessman who spent twelve years in reeducation camps and now practices commercial law in Saigon, believes the United States will not be a significant economic factor in Vietnam's redevelopment. "If you analyze what America can give us—and what we can take from you—it is the leasing of oil and gas to American companies, telecommunications and software,"he said. When Ron put in a plug for American medicine, Bich shook his head. "Too expensive. It must be a charity, not commercial."

The oil-and-gas industry, he said, will operate in remote areas and have limited impact. "For software, the minute Microsoft comes to Vietnam, they will ask if we have a copyright law. The answer is no. They will say 'Forget about it.' "And telecommunications, he noted, is for the rich. "Eighty percent of Vietnamese are farmers. What does this mean to them? There are only 50,000 lines in Saigon; 27,000 in Hanoi. That's the scope of our AT&T."

He said that nothing America offers Vietnam is valuable enough to make the leaders of his country turn away from their lifelong philosophies. Not the Kleenex, not the Coke, not the computers. Any attempt at linkage by American leaders will fail: "We know your luxuries can make us happy, physically, but the Communist leaders will fight because they have fought for so long. Like China, we will accept only a certain amount of pressure. The United States will always lean toward political pressure, and there will always be the question 'What level of pressure can the U.S. government put on us?' "He added, somewhat ominously, "Vietnam is learning. We are learning from China."

···

During the war, I often went to the roof of the Rex Hotel to eat steak dinners and listen to Filipino singers imitate Elvis Presley. As I recall, they did a pretty good job. In general, the entertainment in Saigon wasn't that great. The guys actually fighting in the war didn't get much, but at least they got Bob Hope and Joey Heatherton. We got the cruise-ship bands.

The Rex was a distasteful symbol of the Vietnam War, and rightfully so. The body counts and napalmed villages were the truly appalling images of the war, but the Rex was, in its own small way, loathsome. It was comfy quarters for coddled officers who paid Vietnamese attendants to spit-shine their boots and were so removed from the war that even I felt contempt for them.

The roof of the Rex has gotten even more surrealistic since the war, which is hard to believe. Back then, it offered slot machines, cheap steaks and endless arrangements of "Heartbreak Hotel."Today, it is a vista of outdoor tables amid a menagerie of cats (real), birds (real), fish (real), elephants (statuary), horses (statuary), tigers (statuary) and deer (statuary and topiary), plus every sort of imaginable outdoor ornamentation. It looks as though the manager rented a station wagon and went shopping along U.S. 1 in Maine.

If the roof were a welcome sanctuary during the war, it is even more of one today, a place to escape the incessant begging on the streets of Saigon. Walking along Dong Khoi and Le Loi, I came to recognize them all: the lady with the head-lolling drugged baby, the guy with no face, the maimed kid who walked on his hands. Once I barely outran a footless man who dashed across the street to head me off. The rotten little-boy pickpockets are ruthless and the nasty little-girl postcard sellers pinch. I gave money to the cripples and to the rest I learned to say "No postcard, no cyclo, no stamps, no change money, no girls, no beer, no want nothing."Late in the afternoon, Ron and I would take the elevator to the roof for a beer and an order of Imperial Rolls Saigon Style, my favorite tourist fare.

To the table would come a jack-o'-lantern carved from a pineapple. Ahh, I love the smell of burning pineapple in the evening. Stuck on toothpicks and protruding from the face were myriad crisp, two-bite-sized spring rolls. The normal accoutrements for wrapping—vinegar-based dipping sauce, lettuce and mint—were served alongside. On one occasion, when the hotel's usually overworked kitchen wasn't too busy, the presentation included the word "REX"and a crown, both carved from carrots. The cost: $2.34. Food prices tend to be low and not rounded off at government-sponsored restaurants.

The most famous hotel in Saigon, now and probably forever, is the Hôtel Continental, constructed in the late nineteenth century and situated in splendor across from the Rex and the Municipal Theatre. I was never an admirer of the hotel's terrace, made famous by Graham Greene in The Quiet American and by Somerset Maugham in The Gentleman in the Parlour. To me, the place was too crowded with the kind of people who read Greene and Maugham. The hotel was taken over by the Social Republic in 1975, just after the fall of Saigon, and used as a government guesthouse until 1987, when it closed for two years of renovations. When it reopened, it was clear that the government felt the same way about the terrace that I did. It was no longer there.

Today, the space is occupied by an oversized Italian restaurant called Chez Guido, the most dispirited eating establishment in the city. The room is high-ceilinged and filled with pillars and chandeliers, an effect that makes it look more like a cavernous meeting room in a municipal building than a restaurant. There's so much room between tables that the place feels empty even when it's full, and there's no music, just eerie silence. In a city of terrible service, Chez Guido offers some of the worst, inasmuch as the waiters tend to congregate in a back room and read magazines.

I started my meal with a carpaccio of fish the waiter said was tuna. It wasn't like any tuna I'd ever had. It was ghostly, colorless, tasteless and textureless, something out of Night of the Living Tuna. My seafood risotto was filled with squid, clams, baby shrimp and lovely small muscles; it would have been quite good had the rice not been gummy, probably pre-cooked. My final course, Scaloppine "Chez Guido,"was absolutely first-rate. The noodles were fresh and flavorful, the scallops of pork the best meat I was served in Saigon, and the tomato sauce and cheese atop not bad at all. I sniffed and skipped the grated cheese. Prewar, perhaps?

The Caravelle, the third in the lineup of top-notch hotels surrounding the theater building, was a favorite spot for American journalists during the war and is remembered as the home of the Caravelle Manifesto—in 1960, a few enlightened Vietnamese politicians met there to draw up a document calling for civil-rights reforms, for which they were promptly jailed. During the war, I liked the restaurant on the top floor. My unit held farewell dinners there.

Now, there's a restaurant serving Japanese food on the tenth floor, and one offering a menu of about 200 French, Vietnamese and Chinese dishes on the ninth. Lured by the extraordinarily fine air-conditioning (matched by only the ground-floor lounges of the Rex and Vietnam house) and a piano player performing "Memories,"Ron and I decided to eat at the all-purpose place. I was much taken with the decor: huge overhead fans that resembled propellers on WWII fighter planes; bizarre, spidery chandeliers; badly tended plants; and a well-lit advertisement for Ken Y ice cream over the cashier's desk. Nothing on the menu cost as much as $3, and while none of the food was exceptional, I have to say that everything was worth the price.

The most famous restaurants in Saigon are Maxim's—cabaret downstairs, girlie bar upstairs—and Madame Dai's Bibliothèque, a quirky place where the idea is to eat in the library of Madame Nguyen Phu'o'c Dai's beautiful home on Nguyen Du Street. The best restaurant, however, is La Cigale, located near the Tan Son Nhut Airport and open for only a year.

La Cigale is one of several recently established restaurants attempting to capitalize on the new openness of Saigon. What distinguishes it from the others is good food. We had a ghastly meal at Merlion (nearly raw chicken, watery prawn soup, chaotic service) and an unsuccessful rendition of the Philadelphia cheese steak at a place called City. In case you're interested, Philadelphia cheese steak with grilled onions and French fries reads "Banh mi thit Bo Xao kieu Philadelphia"on a Vietnamese menu. Anybody from Philadelphia who eats this cheese steak is not going to agree that the war is over.

La Cigale is on two floors. Downstairs is a quiet bar with a trio, mid drinks and potato chips that have wilted in the humidity. The dining room, up a flight, is decorated in formal country French. The tablecloths are burgundy, the walls are peach and the chairs well-cushioned. Our table wobbled a bit, but I solved that by stuffing a few 200-dong notes, each worth 1.8 cents, under a leg. Each table was decorated with carnation buds and a hurricane lamp, and each time a new party came to a table, a new candle was lit. Waiters go by Americanized versions of the names, which is how Thoung became Theresa, Hien became Harley and Tinh became Tim.

The restaurant feels like the kind of eating establishment that must have thrived in Saigon in the Forties and Fifties, when French influence was at its peak. The menu is old-world and old-fashioned. Among the main courses, fourteen of the dishes are meat, eleven of those fourteen are sauced, and six of those eleven are prepared with cream. My bowl of impeccable consommé with crunchy vegetables (the crunch a rare bow to modern tastes) came atop a plate that was atop another plate that was atop yet another plate. Later I sought out Massimo Gentile, 23, who with his wife, Carolyn, 23, owns the restaurant in partnership with her mother and Sunimex, a government-run company that encourages joint ventures. When I mentioned to Massimo that I thought the plating was a little extreme, he pointed out that it was correct. La Cigale is quite good and very, very correct.

When Ron and I attempted to dine at Madame Dai's Bibliothèque, we found it considerably more informal. We were offered a table in the garage.

I had made a reservation for Sunday dinner in the famous library. When we arrived, the small, hot, musty, barely air-conditioned book-lined room was already packed with overheated tourists seated at tables covered with some sort of hideous blue-and-yellow-splotched cloths. An antechamber, set up to handle the overflow, was also filled. Madame Dai herself led us beyond the antechamber to the entrance hall, where she commenced to set up a table and folding chairs. Technically, we were not in her garage, but since her motor scooter was parked right next to the table offered us, I couldn't see much difference. We declined. She seemed surprised.

We moved on to Maxim's, lured by the famous name. Other men might have been attracted by the young girls waiting upstairs, but not us. Anyway, the beer up there was $4 a can and the singer was performing "Feelings."The downstairs restaurant offers a lot more for your money: an amateurish but thoroughly enjoyable floor show, a bathroom attendant eager to spritz all comers with an evil-smelling cologne, and very reasonably priced European and Chinese food. As soon as we sat down, we received complimentary snacks, including cashews in airline-type packets. We ordered Chinese mushrooms with shrimp stuffing, baked squab with rock salt, fried shrimp on toast, steamed fish with ginger, and braised spinach with crab meat. Every dish was astonishingly bland. Our check, including meal, floor show, tip and two beers, was less than $35.

The entertainment highlight was a young woman in what looked like a prom dress—do communists have proms?—holding a rose and singing "Unchained Melody."Men flushed with ardor jumped from their chairs to press carnations into her hand. As soon as she finished, everybody got up and left. Everybody but us. Only Ron and I remained to applaud the tenacious young lady performing a less-than-haunting "Ave Maria"on her cello.

For dessert, I ordered the mocha soufflé. Ron had crêpes Suzette. Extravagant? Perhaps, but where else in the world can you get two luxurious French desserts in a place called Maxim's for $1.44?

As I sat there on my final night in Saigon, eating my slightly collapsed soufflé, the seven-piece orchestra broke into a lush arrangement of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes."I glanced up and realized that the eyes I was looking into were my dentist's. And you thought the war ended badly.

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